Hello OP:
First, I can tell this discussion is very difficult for you. You posted here, then deleted, then re-posted. You’ve not followed up on your post despite inviting us to ask questions, which many have. This site is an anonymous group of strangers who all share one thing: each of us has suffered from infidelity. We are here out of the goodness of our hearts, anonymous strangers, to help brothers and sisters like you navigate the difficult terrain of post-Dday life. A great deal of our advice is shaped by the mistakes we ourselves made; we try to guide you so that you don’t make the same mistakes we made.
When it comes to infidelity recovery, details matter. I’m trying to get a handle on the dates. You refer to the period of cheating as February, 2004 through October 2009. That’s 5 year, 6 months. 5.5 years.
-You say the first A lasted a year: February 2004 – February 2005. It ended when AP quit.
-You say she quit that job some time later. Let's say July 2005. There was a 6-month gap before she got her new job. Let's say January, 2006.
-You say the second A was 2 years, 3 months. Working backward from October, 2009, that means it would have started around July, 2006. That means that in spring of 2006, there was a ramp-up period as your WW flirted with AP2.
-You say that your son saw AP2 smack her butt at work during a flirting period leading up to the A. For easy reference, I’ll guess June, 2006. He was 18 then. If your son was 18 in 2006, that means he was born in 1988. 2006 was 17 years ago, meaning he must now be 35 years old. Easily old enough to navigate the complicated emotional landscape he will need to pass through to achieve an honest and loving relationship with you.
Meanwhile, you say that your career has been 40 years. If, like most people, you started in your early 20’s, that means you are now in your early 60’s.
40 years ago was 1983. My guess is that you got married around the same time. You married in your early 20’s, in the early 1980’s. We know your son was born in 1988. Your post references adult "children" meaning other births. We don’t know if they are older or younger, but if you are a typical family, you probably got married in your early 20’s (early 1980’s), had a couple of years of being together before kids, then had a period of a decade, plus or minus, when kids came along and your wife’s life was immersed in being pregnant, nursing, changing diapers, providing care to infants and toddler. Say, 1985-1995. Until your mid-30's.
If you were like most couples, there was probably a fairly steep drop-off in sex during those infancy years. That’s pretty typical. But it's hard on a husband.
As kids round the corner to elementary school years, life for a modern parent in the west (I’m assuming you’re in the USA) become fairly easy. The kids no longer require the intensive physical care required by infants, and the public schools take on a giant presence in their lives, both in terms of consuming their time and attention, but also in terms of serving meals, providing health care, etc. Since your WW took work a decade later as a housekeeper, I’m guessing she is not a highly educated woman, nor a woman with a professional background. Given your success in your career (hence current retirement plans), I’m guessing you were pretty "nose to the grindstone" in that time frame. Again, this pattern is quite common. A married man who is the family’s sole breadwinner is often motivated by a fear of not letting the family down. We obtain a fair amount of our personal sense of worth by being reliable, focused, hard-working providers. By being a man.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that your marital sex life never became that great. The deprivation during the infancy years left you feeling a bit rejected, even mildly emasculated. This, in turn, led to you initiating less often. You had a desire for a more active and varied sex life, but your WW wasn’t showing you the same desire, so out of a mixture of politeness, trying to appear to be a sensitive man attuned to her happiness, and avoiding the sense of rejection and emasculation any man feels when he knows his wife isn't that into sex with him, you demurred and accepted your diluted sex life as simply one of the crosses a married father must bear.
This pattern continued for about 10 years as the kids matriculated to Jr. High, and then High School. Less-than-frequent vanilla sex, but lots of good family times: sporting events, music recitals, parent-teacher conferences, summer vacations, all while working hard to build that career toward retirement. A maelstrom of activity. Sex was less than what you’d like in an ideal world, but the whole – the active nuclear family – was your happy place. Your refuge from the world. To you it seemed okay. What you didn't know is that your wife (likely subconsciously) missed being the object of your gaze of desire, and she was not self-reflective enough to realize that she was the one who had forced it to go away.
As you rounded the corner through the fin de siècle and into the oughts, it was feeling like things were going to work out. You had 20 solid years into your job. You’d moved up in your company to a position of some importance. But your SAHM wife was getting restless. She wanted more adult contact, more relevance in life. Our culture tends to "disappear" women after they get married and have kids, especially SAHM’s who don’t have higher education. Also, there is the thought that if she puts in a certain amount of time, she’ll qualify for social security, which is part of the retirement planning process. She has no real marketable skills but she knows a few people, so she takes a job as a housekeeper in a senior care facility.
What you were probably totally unaware of at the time was that your WW was going through a massive mid-life crisis. This is extremely common for women who are SAHM’s when their kids enter the teen years. They feel utterly irrelevant, forgotten, almost completely disappeared from the face of the earth. A husband like you, working hard, only gets glimpses of the home life. It’s like looking into a room through a partially closed venetian blind. And when you’re home, the family tends to put on its happy face for you, trying to do its part to support your career. The family seems to be humming along like a well-oiled machine, working just fine. We men tend to be fixers. We focus on problems. At home, we don’t see problems, so we stop looking. What you likely didn’t know is that she spent most of her waking hours feeling mostly alone, mostly forgotten. Nobody needed her for anything anymore. To her, home and family was a giant, brewing existential crisis.
At that point, she was at a crossroads. A functional adult woman would have talked to her husband about this, tried to spice up the marriage, asked for more attention from her husband. Your WW wasn’t that. Her job as a housekeeper at a senior care facility, that could hardly have made her feel good about herself. That sort of work is at or near the bottom rung of the ladder. The cost of working is almost equal to what she can earn. It’s irrelevant to your family’s financial situation apart from her qualifying for social security. Her superiors probably constantly remind her that she is utterly fungible and expendable. And the work is gross. Old people are incontinent. They puke blood. They die in bed and leak all manner of liquids. Etc. It’s likely the job made her feel worse, not better.
Except along came AP. He liked her ass, and in his eyes she could see the male gaze, the same gaze she used to see everywhere in her early 20’s, before babies. The same gaze she used to see in your eyes (in fairness to you, that gaze would still be there but you have veiled it to avoid seeming too pushy and demanding in the bedroom in deference to her apparent low desire). It reminds her of the before time, when she felt relevant and exciting. It serves as an escape from the bleakness of her present time, cleaning up excrement from a building full of people whiling away their waning years in death’s lobby.
And she found she liked this second life. It became an escape from her reality. So when she had a second chance at the hotel, even more thrilling because of the "crime caper" aspect, she jumped at it. And she jumped on it. For years, until he quit.
We don’t know at this point whether that was the end of sexual cheating for her. Keep in mind that the period 2004 – 2009 was a period of profound turmoil in the financial world. Deep recession. Most men in our 40’s in that era were terrified of losing our jobs, so we redoubled our efforts at work to preserve our place and persevere until times got better. I reckon you were the same.
By 2009, she was probably pushing the heck out of 50 years of age. Your son would have been in his 20’s. I reckon the other kids in similar ages. Your career would have been out of the weeds and maybe you were in a place to spend more time with her. It’s possible that when he quit, she woke the fuck up, realized what she had spent her 40’s wallowing in, and determined privately to move on.
But she didn’t really move on. Your OP says that the cheating was 20 years ago, but really it’s closer to 10 years ago than 20. That’s important for the timeline. What did your WW spend her 50’s doing, with respect to you? Did she really dig in, make herself into the best wife a woman can be? Show you that you are loved and desired? Frequently initiate imaginative, varied, exciting sex? Etc.? Or did she spend the decade coasting along, wallowing in her self-loathing, allowing the marriage to remain in neutral, with infrequent vanilla maintenance sex only when you initiated? Because to me, that would be the deciding factor. If it was the latter, then she was essentially still cheating on you for that whole decade, even if she didn’t come near another man’s dick during that time. This is because cheating is in large part a mindset – selfishness, inward-focus, feeling self-pity and choosing to wallow in it rather than to invest energy into working on making the marriage better.
By the way, what of the friend your WW confided in about the A? The one your son overheard? Who is she? How do you feel now, knowing that in real time she knew you were being betrayed in such a profound way. Bottom line is that she needs to be cut out of your family’s life entirely. She is an enemy to the marriage. Has your WW offered that up as part of your healing. If she has not, that is a bellwether in terms of whether your WW is a candidate for R.
You’ve said very little about your WW’s response to Dday. You have expressed a sense of urgency about needing like you need to "get over it". I think you’re still in denial about the reality that there is never any getting over it with respect to infidelity.
If I’ve guessed the trajectory correctly, your WW is utterly cliché, in a deeply pathetic and unoriginal way. The SAHM mid-life crisis affair, when the kids reach those late teens, that is the most cliché affair of all. Fundamentally, it is about a woman who is selfish, self-centered, narcissistic, the kind of person who chooses herself over her marriage. Reconciliation only works if she realizes that and fixes herself, makes herself into somebody new, somebody better than she was, somebody whom you could respect and choose to be married to if you had just met her. Has your WW done that? My guess is "no", but that is only based on the lack of information in your thread.
OP, where is your head? What did your most recent conversation with your WW feel like?
[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 4:08 PM, Tuesday, April 11th]
